A few random thoughts that have been rolling around in my head while waiting for the spring sports season to start...

— This fall will mark the 20th season at the Whittemore Center for the University of New Hampshire hockey teams, and it's time to give the place an upgrade. It's still aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound and overall a fine place to watch a hockey game, but the place is showing its age. Its two biggest needs: A new sound system and a video board of some sort. The Whitt currently features wall-to-wall advertising and constant promotional announcements during hockey games (even the fish throw is sponsored). It's time for UNH to pump some of that money into minor improvements to the building, hopefully in time for the women's Frozen Four in 2016.

— I'm trying to come up with some historical comparison to Clarkson (N.Y.) winning the NCAA Division I women's hockey championship last week. Since the NCAA first recognized a national champion in women's hockey in 2001, only three schools — Minnesota-Duluth, Minnesota and Wisconsin — have won the thing. An eastern team has been runner-up nine times.

— Four trends I'm glad college hockey did not pick up from the NHL: Four-on-four overtime, shootouts, the road team wearing white and the two-points-for-a-win, one-point-for-an-overtime-loss nonsense.

— The NFL recently passed rule change that will increase the height of the goalposts by five feet to help officials make an easier determination on whether a field goal is good or wide. Now the goalposts at Dover High School's Dunaway Field are going to look really small.

— For once I'd like to see a men's college basketball team beat Duke, then act like it's no big deal.

— And from the facts-you-probably-wouldn't-know-unless-you-went-there department, the New Mexico men's basketball team has been eliminated in the first round of the NCAA tournament the last two years by teams coached by a former Duke point guard — Harvard's Tommy Amaker in 2013 and Stanford's Johnny Dawkins just last week.